On January 20, 2025, among the executive orders Donald Trump signed as a self-described “dictator on Day One” was this Orwellian example: “Ending The Weaponization Of Government.”

For Trump and the MAGA movement, every accusation is a confession, and this EO is a perfect example of that. It reflects a classic Trump tactic: Accuse your enemies of doing the thing you want to do, so that you will appear justified in doing it to them.

The executive order begins:

“The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions. These actions appear oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives. Many of these activities appear to be inconsistent with the Constitution and/or the laws of the United Statess….”

Under the guise of “ending the weaponization of government,” Trump laid the foundation for using his Justice Department to retaliate against his perceived enemies, and to do precisely the thing he claims to want to end.

The order continues:

“It is the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”

“Take appropriate action.”

Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi demonstrated just how far Trump’s Justice Department would go with the arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly “obstructing an official proceeding and concealing a person from arrest.” As Bondi made clear in an explicit warning to judges at the time, if they in any way thwart Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, “we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

But if you thought the Justice Department targeting judges was bad, it was just the beginning. Trump’s hand-picked U.S. Attorney just arrested Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver for allegedly “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during a scuffle outside a New Jersey ICE facility.

Yes, when Trump selected his former personal lawyer and MAGA loyalist Alina Habba to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, she understood the assignment.

So, what actually happened outside that ICE facility that led to unprecedented charges against a sitting member of Congress? And what are the implications of having a president who brazenly wields the levers of power against his perceived enemies?

At what point do we cease to be a democracy?

Trump’s Weaponization Doctrine

During her January 16 confirmation hearing, Attorney General Bondi previewed the Day One executive order when she declared:

"The partisanship, the weaponization will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all."

“If I am attorney general, I will not politicize that office. I will not target people simply because of their political affiliation."

But Bondi’s record as AG tells a much different story. Take the treatment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

In September, Adams was charged with accepting bribes and illegal campaign contributions from Turkish officials in exchange for favors. In February, Bondi’s office urged those charges be dropped.

As The Guardian reported,

Adams found support from the Trump administration, which urged prosecutors last month to dismiss the case.

Adams shocked many in the city when he went on Fox News with Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan and said “I’m collaborating” with the federal government on its immigration agenda.

Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said the corruption case was interfering with Adams’ re-election campaign and preventing him from helping the federal government step up deportations, a top priority of Trump’s.

They weren’t even trying to hide Trump’s goal here.

Even as U.S. District Judge Dale Ho dropped the charges against Adams, in the very same breath he accused the Justice Department of entering into a “bargain” with the Mayor, saying:

“Dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration. Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”

Ding ding ding.

But Bondi wasn’t done.

The Justice Department launched an inquiry into Andrew Cuomo for statements he made to Congress as Governor about the Covid pandemic—the same Andrew Cuomo who is Adams’s chief rival in this year’s race for NYC Mayor.

As The Times noted:

That puts the Trump administration in the unusual position of having ended a criminal case against the leader of the nation’s largest city and opened one into his chief rival in the span of a few months. Mr. Adams is running for re-election as an independent, and Mr. Cuomo is leading the Democratic primary field in the polls.

And in the understatement of the year:

The existence of the investigation is sure to fuel further criticism that President Trump and his administration are wielding the Justice Department as a cudgel to achieve political ends and punish his perceived enemies.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, put it simply:

“The answer is obvious: This is lawfare and election interference plain and simple — something President Trump and his top Department of Justice officials say they are against.”

So, this is the new Trump doctrine: Do as we say and be rewarded, but stand in our way (or as with Cuomo, stand in the way of our allies) and we will come after you. That is the explicit message Bondi sent to judges with the arrest of Judge Dugan in Wisconsin, and it’s now the message being sent to members of Congress with the arrest of Rep. LaMonica McIver.

The Sham Charges Against Rep. McIver

On May 9, Rep. McIver, along with her colleagues in the House, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez Jr., arrived at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey for an unannounced tour. This is a privilege ICE itself acknowledges is statutorily the purview of members of Congress.

According to The Washington Post’s detailed timeline of events that day, after the three representatives entered and asserted their right to tour the facility, they were escorted inside. Shortly thereafter, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrived at the facility and was let in through the gate after a guard assumed he was with the Congressional delegation. Then, as the House members waited for their tour to begin, agents from the ICE facility went out to confront Mayor Baraka, accusing him of trespassing and asking him to leave.

Things escalated when it became clear that despite Baraka exiting the facility gate, DHS agents still intended to arrest Baraka. That’s when chaos ensued.

Per WaPo:

About a dozen agents then amassed behind the fence. Some pulled masks up over their faces, and the group exited the facility gate and approached Baraka with handcuffs. The three members of Congress, their staffs, and protesters surrounded the mayor to keep agents from reaching him.

As federal agents attempted to arrest Baraka, McIver wrapped her right arm around him and began repeating, “Don’t touch us, don’t touch us,” video shows.

The physical encounter played out over the next 90 seconds and involved more than a dozen uniformed agents and a similar number of protesters and others in plain clothes.

Video captures multiple instances in the scrum when McIver and federal agents made physical contact, beginning with one in which a Homeland Security agent gripped her arm and she pulled her hand up to break away.

You can watch some video clips from the scuffle in this NBC New York report:

Ultimately, after dropping federal trespassing charges against Mayor Ras Baraka, U.S. Attorney Habba brought charges against McIver, saying she “assaulted, impeded, and interfered with law enforcement in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 111(a)(1)."

According to ABC News:

The complaint alleges McIver tried to "thwart the arrest" of Baraka after he had been told to leave the secured area of the facility because, unlike the congresspeople, he did not have lawful authority to be there. She is accused of making "forcible contact" with authorities, including allegedly slamming her forearm into a Homeland Security Investigations agent and pushing and using "each of her forearms to forcibly strike" an ICE officer, according to the complaint.

Needless to say, these charges directly contradict Rep. McIver’s version of events as she expressed on All In With Chris Hayes the night of the incident.

And the video evidence as compiled by The Washington Post calls the charges into question as well.

During a virtual hearing with a federal judge Wednesday morning, Rep. McIver was read her rights and released on her own recognizance. McIver is due to appear in court in person for a preliminary hearing on June 11. If she is convicted of these felony assault charges, McIver could face up to eight years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

But will the U.S. Attorney’s office end up dropping the charges against Rep. McIver, just as they dropped the federal trespassing charges against Mayor Baraka?

Certainly, the New Jersey Congresswoman shows no signs of backing down, saying in a statement:

"The charges against me are purely political -- they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight," McIver said. "This administration will never stop me from working for the people in our district and standing up for what is right. I am thankful for the outpouring of support I have received and I look forward to the truth being laid out clearly in court."

In other words: Bring it on.

McIver should be confident in her position. For one thing, it was only after this supposedly “violent” incident that ICE escorted all three members of the House into the facility for their tour.

As top House Democrats said in a joint statement following the news that charges had been brought against McIver:

"There is no credible evidence that Rep. McIver engaged in any criminal activity, and she would not have been permitted to tour the facility had she done anything wrong."

Notably, this is the same Justice Department that implemented Trump’s “full, complete and unconditional pardon” of January 6th rioters, many of whom were caught on video and even convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers. The notion that this Justice Department is somehow a fierce champion of violence against law enforcement as Bondi claims is absurd on its face.

Indeed, from the start, this has seemed like an accusation in search of a crime. On May 10, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security threatened to arrest all three members of Congress who visited the ICE detention facility that day.

And as The Washington Post makes clear, DHS Secretary Noem weighed in with blatant falsehoods, seeming to just make things up to demonize McIver:

Speaking about the events outside the Delaney Hall detention facility, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem last week testified to Congress that a “mob of protesters including three members of Congress stormed the gate and they trespassed into the detention facility.” Her department published a news release claiming the lawmakers used an arriving “bus of detainees” as a decoy to gain entrance, then “holed up in a guard shack.” A department spokeswoman said lawmakers attacked officers, including “body slamming a female ICE officer.”

With WaPo noting:

The videos examined by The Post did not support those descriptions of the events, and the government did not include them in its charges against McIver.

Ultimately, whether the charges are dropped or not is beside the point. The message has been sent.

As Rep. Jasmine Crocket noted in her statement of support for McIver:

"While attempting to conduct oversight, she was met with retaliation, intimidation—and now, they're hitting her with charges.

Let’s be honest: this isn’t about justice. It’s a political stunt—plain and simple. Charging Rep. McIver is a desperate attempt to scare her into silence.

If they can come for an elected Member of Congress while she’s doing her job, they can come for anybody. Doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen, a green card holder, or someone just trying to survive in this country—if you challenge their power, you become a target.

This is the same tired authoritarian playbook we’ve seen again and again under this administration.”

The Threats And Intimidation Are The Point

Putting enemies on notice that dissent will not be tolerated and that the force of the law will be brought to bear against them, is right out of the fascist playbook. It is also a favorite tactic of Trump’s.

Ezra Klein hosted a thought-provoking discussion with authors Zack Beauchamp and Andrew Marantz recently that posed the question “Is Trump Losing?”

Klein set the table this way:

What timeline are we in, and how will we know? Are we watching the fundamental erosion of American democracy, its liberties, its safeguards? Are we on a path that is quickly becoming irreversible?

Or are we in the timeline where the Trump administration is doing a lot, where it is trying to arrogate new powers to itself — but to the extent it has a fundamental plan to reformat the way the American political system works, it is simply running into too much opposition and has too little power to succeed?

Beauchamp argues that, all told, given the number of court cases Trump has lost, there is a compelling argument that Trump’s project to slide us into a competitive authoritarian state is actually failing. Other evidence that Trump is losing, Beauchamp notes: The resistance to him is growing, universities are finally standing up to him, and anti-Trump media is alive and well.

But Marantz isn’t so sure those are the right metrics. From Marantz’s perspective, winning every court case isn’t Trump’s goal with his legal strategy, but rather it’s to move the goalposts, throw arguments at the wall and see what sticks, and gradually, like a pot of boiling water, shift the American political order away from democracy.

As Marantz said:

“If Trump is able to break through to a new political paradigm and get competitive authoritarianism, I think that is part of how he will do it. He'll throw a bunch of stuff to the courts that says, the 14th Amendment doesn't say what it says.

I know you said discrimination against trans people was illegal, but I'm going to do it. On and on and on and on and on, and if they let him get one out of those 10 things, that is actually how you get competitive authoritarianism. You throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

I agree that he's doing it in this flagrant, blatant way. It could be incompetence and impulsiveness. It could be actually that that's part of the strategy.

But either way, I don't think he's going to get it by amending the Constitution. I don't think he's going to get it by indefinite martial law. I think if he gets it, it'll be through stuff like this.”

And one could argue that this is precisely what Trump is doing by wielding the power of the Justice Department against the media, universities, judges, and now members of Congress.

But as long as we have people like Rep. McIver and other champions of our democratic norms standing in the breach, Trump is less likely to succeed in his anti-democratic crusade.